Tuesday, 31 March 2015

With a natural colour palette in wood, black and white, you can gather quite a lot of items without making a cluttered impression. Take this apartment for example, located in Malmö, Sweden, and belonging to an interior designer. I fell for the dining room with its large windows, open shelving, green plants and mix of chairs around the table. You can see more pictures here.

Wednesday, 25 March 2015

Had enough of white walls? Want to go with the current trend and dare a darker shade, but not yet ready for midnight blue, moss green or dramatic black? Go for grey. As neutral as white, less gloomy than black, and easier to work with than a colored wall.

To get you going, here are 6 ideas on how to give life to a grey wall!

In order to achieve a clean Scandinavian style despite the lack of white walls, do like Nina/Stylizimo in her newly renovated bedroom: go for crisp white on furniture and flooring instead. Add a piece of leather (like the pouffe here) to warm up the monochrome palette.

Tuesday, 24 March 2015

During our London bloggers tour, we were lucky to be staying in a beautiful apartment on Portobello Road in Notting Hill.When we arrived the first day, there were several big boxes waiting for us. The boxes were packed with beautiful things from Nest, an online shop with a great range of contemperary design furniture, lighting and accessories, including some of my favourite Scandinavian brands like Menu, Hay, Muuto and Ferm Living. Nest also provides lots of interior inspiration on their website, and if you wish to see all these lovely products IRL, they have a showroom in Sheffield.

Our task for the weekend was to play around and style the products in our Portobello apartment... and so we did!

Monday, 23 March 2015

For Buster+Punch, it all started in a garage in East London. Inspired by London's fashion, music and sub-culture scenes, they create products with lots of attitude. Lighting, hardware, motorbikes and whisky bars are all made with the same passion for solid materials and unexpected products.

On our recent bloggers tour to London, we visited Buster+Punch's cool showroom and got an exclusive look at the brand new LED Buster bulbs before they were officially launched last week. This is a unique product that combines an ambient light and a focused spotlight in the same bulb. The bulb comes in gold, smoked or crystal glass and it looks fantastic, especially together with the new Heavy Metal pendants.

Sunday, 15 March 2015

While looking for kitchen inspiration for a future project at the design school where I teach regularly, I ran into this new book from German editor Gestalten: Kitchen Kulture. Considering that the kitchen is the new living room, ie the multi-functional hub of the home, the book showcases traditional, Nordic or futuristic kitchens of the 21st century."The kitchens presented in this book are testing grounds for environmentally-friendly innovation as well as lively spaces that inspire a higher quality of life by prompting better eating habits and bringing together family and friends".
Here below you can see a few sneak peeks and here you can buy the book.

Thursday, 12 March 2015

Last week I was on a design tour to London with my dear blogger friends! We wanted to discover what Great Britain has to offer in terms of interesting design, and I will tell you all about our findings in a series of blog posts here over the next few weeks.

To start with, I want to share a few pictures that we took at Folklore, a beautiful and very inspiring little shop in Islington. I could seriously have walked away with more or less everything in that shop! We had the nice task of doing some improvised styling with their products, and this is how it turned out...

Founded in 2012 by Danielle Reid and Rob Reid, Folklore is a home and lifestyle store based on a simple idea that better living is possible through design. Folklore values integrity, simplicity and craftmanship, and are drawn to functional goods that are created with care and made to last.

Tuesday, 3 March 2015

You might have seen this apartment around already, but I'm showing it here anyway because it's a great example of what is happening in Scandinavia right now (well at least in Sweden): bye bye white walls, hello dark colours! Remember this post about darker colours in the kitchen? Or this apartment styled in three différent ways?
Well, walls in muted tones of blue, green, grey or even black are now popping up everywhere!

In order to keep a feeling of space and light despite the dark walls, the trick is to go for light furniture, a decluttered decoration and leave ceilings, doors and windows in white. You can also paint only the lower part of the wall or leave some walls white to avoid overloading. Details in leather, wood and rustic ceramics add warmth to the room, not to forget the green plants.
The great styling is done by the talented Sarah Widman and her team for Alvhem.